Paintings

For the last ten years, I’ve been producing paintings of scenes and subjects that evoke unsatisfied senses of desire or loss. While there are moments of discovery within the process, an inability to fully understand my interest in the subject is a requirement to begin. The hints that do exist don’t always point in the same direction; the only common thread being some combination of experiential presence, longing, memory and mystery. Rather than affect any of these paintings with overt comment or critique, my interest is in what meaning can be derived from them in the aggregate, and what, if anything, they will reveal about the places and subjects they depict after they have left my studio for the places—of one kind or another—that are reserved for art. With American Transcendentalists and Whitman as my heroes of the faith, I hope to explore the landscapes of time and loss discovered more recently by the earnest doubts of W.G. Sebald, Cormac McCarthy, and Werner Herzog.

My latest body of work corresponded to a solo show at Haw Contemporary in September, 2016. "Memorial" is an introduction of new subject matter, as well as a re-contextualization of several previous themes.

The "Night Pools" series began in 2014 with an eponymous solo show at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. A follow-up show of the four largest pools to date, entitled "Until It's All You See", was exhibited in 2015 as part of a residency at the Studios Inc.

From time to time, I will paint portraits of palm trees. To be specific, the sixteen most cold-hardy species of palm, as they are most likely to survive in the winters of Missouri, where I live. Each painting's palette corresponds to the colors printed in the spreads of women's clothing catalogs that have been delivered to my home, addressed to my wife.

It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling they've got hold of the wrong thread.W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

All night sheetlightening quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a blueish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian